You may not know this, but it takes a village to create a killer sex scene. All week long—in celebration of the forthcoming Golden Globes and ELLE's annual Women in TV issue—we'll be putting the women and men responsible for prime time's most sizzling moments in the hot seat. From the actors (hello, Scandal's Tony Goldwyn!) to the costumers to the prop stylists (yoohoo, sex toy specialist on Broad City!), we're getting up close and personal all week long. This is Masters of On-Screen Sex.

Next up: Tony Goldwyn, who currently plays President Fitzgerald Grant III on Scandal opposite Kerry Washington's Olivia Pope. The once forbidden, on-and-off couple, now openly romancing in the show's fifth season, have stirred #Olitz fandom with their steamy on-screen romps everywhere from an electrical closet to the shower to the president's East Wing bedroom. Here, Goldwyn details what it's like to create those titillating scenes scenes as an actor.

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"The first thing that we talk about or pay attention to in a love scene is what it is about beyond the fact that it's a love scene. What we're trying to accomplish is what the scene is saying really, specifically, about our relationship, and where the relationship is at, and what we want to communicate with it. Because, being very specific about that is the thing that saves you from kind of very gratuitous, generic, sex on-screen. That drives everything.

Then, Tom Verica, one of our executive producers, or whatever director we're working with, will talk pretty technically about what he has in mind. Kerry and I try to go through the motions of it to see if it feels right to us and we obviously talk about what either of us are uncomfortable with or about what other ideas we might have. Then, we mark through it, getting the physical choreography of it right. At this point, the good part is that Kerry, Tom, and I all have a very high level of trust and comfort with each other, which makes it a whole lot easier.

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"Being very specific saves you from very gratuitous, generic, sex on-screen."

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It's very, very technical–once we feel comfortable with that it's literally like any other kind of choreography. Once we're actually filming, we can just throw ourselves into it and be totally emotionally engaged and play the scene. That makes it a whole lot easier, because it's a terribly self-conscious, bizarre thing to do when you think about 50, 60 people staring at you doing this thing.

Whenever we do these scenes, however, it's a minimal amount of crew actually on the set. There's usually two sound men, the camera operator, the camera assistant who does the focus, the dolly grip who moves the camera around, the first assistant director who gets everything rolling, and then there'll be the wardrobe people who will rush in and out if you're unclothed as soon as they yell 'Cut' to throw a robe over you to make sure that everyone's comfortable. And then the prop people come in and out. But it is pretty minimal.

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The director choreographs the scene in conjunction with [Kerry and me]. The director has, sometimes, very, very specific things in mind. The more specific, the better, frankly, because that makes our job easier. There's no improvisation in terms of dialogue, but there might be room within what actions we're doing. We try to keep it very fluid and real unless it's a very specific shot–sometimes it gets really technical where the director says, 'Move your hand here'–when we're in the midst of it we leave ourselves room. As soon as the director says 'Cut!' we get dressed. We kind of laugh at each other to take the pressure off.

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Because we're in television, especially network television, you don't really see much. We wear underwear or flesh colored things on the parts that we're not really supposed to catch a glimpse of. So, you're actually not that exposed while filming. If you're doing a cable film or a feature, often, you basically have to be naked or you can cover up your naughty bits. But, Scandal is really not that scandalous, frankly.

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"'Scandal' is really not that scandalous, frankly."

With the start of season five, the whole thing was Fitz and Olivia living in a fantasy bubble. You know, after all of the pressure on them, and everything that has been keeping them apart at the beginning of this season, we basically have a week, narratively speaking, where we're living in this bubble of romantic, erotic fantasy. We were literally living our dreams of being together. We're sort of drugged! We were living in this intoxicating fantasy, and you know that there's going to be a come-uppance whenever you try to do that. And certainly there was. So that's really what our attention was on during a sex scene: really on that connection and exploring that very deep, but still fantasy-driven connection, between Fitz and Olivia.

The discomfort of doing those sex scenes is always the case whenever you do one, even as many times as we've done them. It's like you're jumping into cold water. But sex scenes are a part of the job. Some people are comfortable with it, and some people aren't. But if it's not gratuitous and–it's a part of life so the way I view it, is that we represent life and sometimes we represent very uncomfortable, intimate aspects of life, whether it's emotional or physical.

Sex scenes are very confronting. You just have to kind of go, 'Alright, this is important to the piece. It's necessary, and I need to get over whatever my ego is. Acting is, in some sense, about exposing yourself."